Moments Like These: Peter McLennan

Can you remember who took this photo and when?
Wildside label boss Murray Cammick shot it. Gavin Downie had recently joined the band, which makes it 1994 I think. It was in a car park in central Auckland in the middle of winter, and we were freezing our butts off, hence the beanies, jackets, etc. At that point, we were heading in about a million different directions musically – we put together the ‘Gospel of the DNA Demon’ EP which came out in late ’95 and toured to support it. Shortly after that Johnny and I left the band for spiritual reasons. 

What was your relationship then and what are the others doing now?
They were my bandmates, and today I can still call them my friends, which I’m very proud of. The Picassos were a tribe, not a band, or that’s how we described ourselves in interviews. It was about including our fans in the equation. When we’d do gigs, we’d always come back out and sit round on the front of the stage afterwards and talk to the folks who had come to see us play. There was some other bands round Auckland at the time who thought they were better than their fans and that they were special, and we weren’t having a bar of that crap.
Bobbylon and Roland are still lurking around Auckland city. Johnny Pain was in Singapore making animated kids TV shows for the last few years – he’s recently shifted to Toronto to do more of the same, but is going back to Singapore as he’s joined a thrash metal band there. He also recorded as Pains People post-HPs, and played bass in the Nudie Suits – the man is a musical chameleon. Gavin was in The Managers and a few other acts, and is working as a guitar tech for hire.

How did you get the name ‘Hallelujah Picassos’ and how did the band evolve?
We started out playing as a garage punk band called the Rattlesnakes for about a year and a half. By then our sound had evolved, adding reggae and ska, so we needed a new name. I turned up late for practice one Sunday afternoon (I’d been at work, I think), and the others had a sheet of paper with heaps of names scribbled on it. They’d narrowed it down to three, and the only decent one was Hallelujah Picassos. I was at art school at the time, so I went for that name. And of course, as Jonathan Richman sang, Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
The Picassos live was a full-on thing. One of the best things about the Picassos was that people either got it or they didn’t. That style of mashing up genres (labelled ‘crossover’, back then), no-one really got it on a widespread scale until a few years after we split, when US ska-punk outfits like Sublime and Rancid found mass popularity with it.
As we evolved musically, we basically kept adding new genres to our musical ammo, and didn’t attempt to limit what we attempted stylistically. We had four strong personalities in the band, with the contrasting vocal styles of front man Roland’s aggressive rasp, and crooner Bobbylon on the drum seat – he was once labelled as the Dirty Harry of NZ reggae – face of steel, voice of gold. All four of us wrote songs, so we never had a shortage of material to play with, and pretty much everything we wrote we recorded too.
We ended up with these descriptions of our music with A LOT of hyphens; reggae-ska-thrash-rap-punk-funk... which is why, when people asked us what sort of music we played, we said ‘Picasso core’. Much simpler. And we had a song mentioning it, with the delightfully subtle chorus, “Picasso core will fuck your mind”. We even made a video for it, which got played on television. Once. True story.